Text Pages \ Denying Ritual Abuse of Children

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A great deal of literature has been amassed on the often extreme and debilitating effects of child sexual abuse on its victims, effects which may last a lifetime. To have four comparative studies as methodologically sound as the ones presented above all illustrating that ritual abuse causes even greater effects on child victims than does sexual abuse should give us as a nation serious pause…

Given the accumulation of data illustrating not only that children reporting ritual abuse are profoundly negatively impacted by those experiences, but that they are even more severely impacted than are child victims of sexual abuse, how can we give any weight at all to the skeptical position that ritual abuse memories are no more than screen memories for Incest experiences that are actually worse, suppressed from awareness and replaced by accounts of impossibly bizarre rituals? If children claiming to be ritually abused were in fact sexually abused only, then clearly their symptomatology should be similar to and no more serious than that of sexually abused children…

The psychological condition of ritually abused children matches the accounts they give of what has been done to them not only in the severity of their symptomatology, but also in its particulars. That is to say, not only do ritually abused children appear more disturbed than sexually abused children on traditional instruments like the Achenbach, they also demonstrate symptoms which relate In direct and obvious ways to the abuse experiences they describe. For example, because ritual abuse usually involves traumatic confinement, ritually abused children often fear elevators, closets, and other small spaces. Because these children have often had urine and feces smeared on their bodies and put in their mouths, they may smear themselves or others with urine or feces, or develop phobias of the bathroom. Because many of these children have witnessed torture and killing, and have been threatened with death of themselves and their loved ones, they often fear that they or their family members will be killed. And so on. (See Gould, 1992, for a more complete account of the symptomatology that characterizes ritually abused children.) The nature as well as the severity of ritually abused children’s symptomatology gives eloquent and tragic testimony to the fact that ritual abuse does indeed exist, in all the horror described by its victims, both young and old.

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